Germany’s anti-Palestinianism is escalating
On June 6, the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) issued a report on the suppression of Palestinian activism in the European Union and the United Kingdom. Focusing on using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism, the document found that there were “widespread restrictions on the right of assembly and freedom of expression” associated with criticism of Israel.
In one of the three countries targeted by the report – Germany – violations were found ranging from the firing of employees on false accusations of anti-Semitism to the denial of public spaces for pro-Palestinian events to the lifting of funding for organizations. None of ELSC’s findings surprised me.
As a Palestinian resident of Germany, I have seen it all. I came to the country in 2015, having survived nearly three decades of ongoing Israeli aggression against Gaza.
I bore the trauma of the war, of the relentless Israeli siege, of the ongoing ethnic cleansing and dispossession of my people at the hands of the Israeli occupiers. And when I tried to talk about it, about the suffering of my people, I was immediately shut down.
I was constantly warned to be careful what I said as it did not reflect “German values”. I was told that I am an anti-Semite, that I am a terrorist.
I tried to make my voice heard on the German mainstream media, but to no avail. If I had tried to write for an Israeli newspaper, I would have had more freedom to express myself than I ever had on German media.
I have even been taken to court for my Palestinian activism. In 2017, two Israeli activists and I protested against Knesset member Aliza Lavie speaking at a hasbara event called “Life in Israel – Terror, Bias and the Chances for Peace” at Humboldt University in Berlin. The German media smeared us and falsely accused us of anti-Semitism, while the university filed criminal charges against us for “trespassing”. We were immediately criminalized for our peaceful protest. But after three years of legal battle, we won – we won!
I have been to several other countries in Europe and I have never experienced so much hostility from the state for my Palestinian activism as in Germany. And I feel that the German state’s violent anti-Palestinism is reaching new peaks with each passing year.
As the ELSC report pointed out, the justification for Germany’s crackdown on anything critical of Israel is often perceived anti-Semitism. It equates Zionism with Judaism, despite the fact that this false equivalence has been rejected by countless Jewish scholars and groups around the world.
This accusation has been actively used by both public and private institutions to suppress not only the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, but anyone who speaks out to pressure the Israeli regime to comply with international and human rights law and to grant the Palestinians their rights.
In 2019, the German parliament passed a resolution labeling the BDS movement as anti-Semitic. This motion has been used to silence, silence and censor pro-Palestinian activism, despite the fact that German courts have ruled against anti-BDS actions by government agencies on several occasions, believing they violated the violate freedom of expression.
The false accusations of anti-Semitism have also been used to target specific individuals and especially those with a migrant background who are ludicrously accused of “bringing anti-Semitism to Germany”.
In February 2022, German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle fired seven Palestinian and Arab journalists for alleged anti-Semitic statements. Two of the journalists, Maram Salem and Farah Maraqa, challenged their smear campaign and dismissal in court and won.
But the German authorities’ anti-Palestinism goes beyond trying to suppress anti-Israeli criticism. Their savage response to attempts by the Palestinian community to mark the Nakba – the word Palestinians use for their ethnic cleansing of their homeland – shows that they strive to literally deny Palestinian existence in the public space.
Last year I physically experienced what this means. After the Berlin police banned a meeting on the occasion of the Nakba and two courts upheld its decision, hundreds of Palestinians and their allies decided to take to the streets in small groups. We wore kufiyahs to show our solidarity.
Despite our small numbers, the police presence was overwhelming, with armored vehicles that reminded me of home under Israeli occupation and colonization.
I wore a kufiyah and looked Palestinian. I was stopped by a dozen police officers. They asked for my ID and one of them asked why I was wearing a kufiyah and said I was protesting and breaking the ban. While I objected to being stopped, I was suddenly seized, brutally attacked, and arrested. They almost dislocated my shoulder and I had to be hospitalized for it.
However, the psychological pain of what I was experiencing was much worse than the physical one. Not only was I denied the chance to publicly mourn the dispossession of my people, but two days earlier I – and other Palestinians and our allies – had also been forbidden to mourn Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by the Israeli army.
This year we have tried again to commemorate the Nakba. We tried to mobilize the left by encouraging environmental, feminist and migrant groups to join us and carried out the preparations under the slogan “Free Palestine from German Debt”.
But again we were banned.
Some groups defied the ban and carried Palestinian flags and a banner reading “Existence is Resistance” through the streets. A heavy police presence prevented even a small flash mob event from going ahead. And again they accused us of anti-Semitism to justify our removal from public space.
Not only is this an unfounded claim, but it also raises the question of why the German police – so concerned about the public display of anti-Semitism – are not banning racist and neo-Nazi groups, who actually hold anti-Semitic beliefs, from marching across the country. country. Last year, for example, just two months after we were banned from marking the Nakba, neo-Nazis were allowed to march through the city of Mainz; and it was not the police who dispersed them, but a large mob of anti-fascists.
The Palestinian community in Germany is one of the largest in Europe, but they are made invisible, regularly intimidated by German police and institutions, under surveillance and dehumanized in the media as anti-Semites and would-be terrorists.
These tactics aimed at depoliticizing Palestinians can affect their residency status, job search, or even housing.
One has to wonder what these “German values” are when Palestinians are systematically mistreated in this cruel way in their name. One has to wonder if they are not simply a reflection of white supremacy, which allowed the German state to extend Israeli apartheid against Palestinians into its own territory.
This has taken its toll on Palestinian Germans. Many of them are afraid to speak up; others are exhausted from the constant battle they have had to fight to claim the right to free speech that everyone else enjoys in Germany. Palestinian intellectuals have been publicly attacked and stigmatized, often tarnishing their careers.
And yet, Palestinians in Germany continue to resist and silence state repression. There is a young generation of Palestinians who do not want to comply with German state dictates just to feel a sense of belonging. They do not remain silent despite humiliation and pressure. Organizations such as Palestine Spricht (Palestine Speaks) Let no act of repression pass without a public response and challenge.
Criminalizing Palestinians for standing up for Palestinian rights, while neo-Nazis are allowed to publicly express their fascist slogans, is a moral failure of Germany. It is time for Palestine to be freed from the German debt. It is time for Germany to stop demanding that the Palestinians pay for their historic sins and embrace the Palestinian struggle for justice and liberation.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.